My Last Empress

by Da Chen (Crown)

In the last days of the Chinese Empire, Pickens, a New England blueblood, arrives in the Forbidden City to tutor the young emperor, bidden by the ghost of a lost childhood love, the “darling, darling Annabelle.” In the lantern-lit corridors, Pickens finds not Annabelle but her seeming doppelgänger, a mixed-blood girl chosen as the emperor’s child bride. Bemoaning her confined existence in a palace filled with treacherous eunuchs and concubines, she bewitches the tutor. Pickens’s Lolita-esque affair with the thirteen-year-old empress, a blond “dazzle of a nymphet,” is the narrative backbone of the Chinese émigré writer Da’s sensual, if slim and breathless, novel. The story of contorted and entangled love excavates the depth of corruption and bureaucratic rot in a palace that has long ago become a ghost of its former self. ♦

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